Image: Molly Mahon.

Friend of Selvedge, Molly Mahon, is holding a silent auction to raise money for The Charleston Trust. Charleston is a charity which receives no public funding. Its closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic, together with the cancellation of Charleston Festival, is financially devastating for the organisation. It costs over £1m a year to conserve the house and garden, to give a platform to important conversations, art and ideas through their festivals, events and exhibition programmes, and to open and share Charleston with visitors.

Image: Rose Electra Harris.

Molly has spent much of lock down channelling her positive and creative energy into filming some wonderful potato printing tutorials that she has shared with her clients and Instagram followers. She never expected the reaction she has received and to keep the creative joy of potato printing alive, Molly has reached out to a number of artists associated with Charleston, to create a portfolio of unique, one off works of art to help raise money for The Charleston Trust. Welcome to #thegreatpotatoprintingsociety auction - potato printing together to raise funds for The Charleston Trust. Artists including Neisha Crosland, Cressida Bell and Rose Electra Harris have donated one-off A3 prints, all made using potatoes.

Image: Cressida Bell.

As well as being home to artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Charleston was a meeting place for members of the wider Bloomsbury group. Eminent Charlestonians and visitors included Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes and Vanessa Bell’s sister Virginia Woolf. The Bloomsbury group included some of the twentieth century’s most pioneering artists, writers and thinkers – people who believed in debate, creativity, beauty, innovation and truth and whose work was guided by a sense of fun, freedom and irreverence. The Charleston Trust aims to further the Bloomsbury group’s experimentalism, internationalism and anti-establishment approach, their new ideals for living and belief that the arts and freedom of expression are fundamental.

The online auction will close at 23:59 on Wednesday 23rd September.